The Internet of Things (IoT) is closely linked to the physical world and its importance will far exceed the current Internet. IoT identifiers will also become more important than the Internet domain names of information resources. It will be difficult for IoT identifiers to follow Internet's domain management model of assignment by unified global organization. IoT identifiers will be assigned and managed by multiple countries or agencies based on different coding standards. Currently, IoT identifiers coding system consists mainly of EPC code proposed by EPCglobal in the United States (Electric Product Code), uCode code (Ubiquitous Code) proposed by uID Center of Japan, mRFID Code (Mobile RFID Code, mobile RFID code) presented by Korean TTA (Telecommunications Technology Association, Telecommunications Technology Association), Handle code proposed by the international organization DONA (Digital Object Numbering Authority), OID codes (Object Identifier) proposed by the international organization ISO/IEC, as well as the CPC code (Commerce Product Code) proposed by the Ministry of Commerce of China. With the development of future IoT, more IoT identification codes will emerge. For example, The Article Numbering Center of China is developing Ecode (Entity code), which will further exacerbate the level of heterogeneity in IoT identifiers, which results in that IoT identification resolution system faces serious conflicts in heterogeneous coding.
Further, since IoT identifiers have different code standards, the resolution protocols corresponding to IoT identifiers are also not the same. For example, EPC, mRFID Code, OID, and CPC codes all use identification resolution protocol similar to DNS, while uCode adopts a proprietary identifications resolution protocol similar to DNS. On the other hand, Handle uses Handle System agreement to resolve IoT identifiers which is completely different from DNS. Ecode has not yet clearly specified its resolution protocol. The IoT identifiers that emerge in the future may also adopt new or customized unique identification resolution protocols. Thus, IoT identifiers have heterogeneous conflicts not only in identification coding, but also in corresponding heterogeneous identification resolution protocols, making it impossible to reach a unified resolution between different IoT identification resolution protocols.
The current global IoT applications are mostly closed loop applications for specific industries or companies, which commonly use particular IoT identification coding rules and identification resolution protocols, and each depending on the specific IoT applications. As a result, existing IoT applications often cannot directly communicate with each other, which not only affects user experience, but also inhibits development of large-scale IoT applications. Therefore, it is of great significance to develop a unified heterogeneous IoT identification code and an IoT identification resolution system compatible with any heterogeneous IoT identification resolution systems, in order to address the conflicts in identification coding and corresponding heterogeneous identification resolution protocols, and to provide a common identification resolution for IoT identifiers, to promote large-scale development of various IoT applications.
Recent studies related to heterogeneous conflicts in IoT identification resolutions are as follows:
As mentioned earlier, the current IoT identification coding systems include EPC, uCode, mRFID Code, Handle OID, CPC, etc., and each IoT identification coding system corresponding to different identification resolution protocol. Currently there are three main types of IoT identification resolution protocols, namely DNS protocol, DNS-like protocol, and Handle System protocol. More IoT identifiers and corresponding identification resolution protocols will emerge in the future. The currently available IoT resolution systems support only a single type identifier and identification resolution protocol, and are not sufficiently compatible with a variety of heterogeneous identification codes and identification resolution protocols. For example, ONS (Object Name Service) proposed by EPCglobal in the United States is based entirely on existing Internet DNS protocol, which only supports resolution of EPC codes. ucodeRP (ucode Resolution Protocol) proposed by uID Center of Japan uses a proprietary resolution protocol that is similar to DNS protocol, also only can only support resolution of uCode code. Handle code by DONA is based on the Handle protocol, which is completely incompatible with the DNS protocol, and only supports Handle code resolution.
The present applicant carried out research in early 2005 related to resolving conflicts in heterogeneous IoT identifiers to achieve unified IoT identifier coding and resolution. Based on this research, patent application “A method and system for addressing Things” was filed in 2008, and granted on Apr. 17, 2013 (patent number: ZL200810239867.7). However, this method only supports IoT identifiers for domain name protocols but does not support heterogeneous IoT identification resolution, and has not addressed the problem of conflicts in heterogeneous IoT identification and resolution protocols.
RNS is further refined to patent ZL200810239867.7 by specifically proposing a two-segment mechanism for IoT identification resolution. This mechanism designs IoT identifiers including a standard code and an item code. The related identification resolution protocol includes two corresponding logic portions respectively for resolving standard code and the item code. The former is responsible for conversion rules for resolving standard code into domain identification based on DNS resolution protocol, and using such conversion rules to resolve IoT identifiers into the corresponding domain address. Because this mechanism is a detailed implementation to patent ZL200810239867.7, it also cannot solve the problem of conflicts in heterogeneous IoT identifiers and resolution protocols, and does not support heterogeneous IoT identification resolution.
International organizations ISO/IEC and ITU-T have proposed a similar solution, which utilizes OID (Object IDentifier) as the standard code prefix for unifying IoT identifiers. The OID resolution system based on DNS design can achieve conversions and resolution of heterogeneous IoT identification, and solve the problem of conflicts in heterogeneous IoT identifiers. The proposal can be considered as a concrete implementation of patent ZL200810239867.7 based on OID, which similarly did not consider supporting heterogeneous IoT identification resolution protocol either.
University of Helsinki, Finland has constructed DIALOG (Distributed Information Architectures for collaborative LOGistics) system based ID@ URI mechanism, which separates IoT identifiers into two parts: ID and URI, which are separated by identifier “@”. The URI section is based on resolution of DNS protocol. The ID section format is to be specified by managers in the specific fields, which needs to be unique within URI to assure unique global IoT identifiers. The ID@URI mechanism utilizes existing DNS resolution service. Because the mechanism is entirely dependent on DNS resolution protocol, it also cannot support other non-DNS IoT protocols.
Thus, the current efforts are focused on solving conflicts in heterogeneous IoT identification code level. The basic idea is to identify transcoding rule for resolution, two-segment resolution, or resolution mechanism based on URI or OID, to convert heterogeneous IoT identifiers into a particular identification code based on a specific resolution protocol (such as DNS protocol), and then to resolve the particular identifier using a specific resolution protocol, thus enabling compatibility in resolutions of heterogeneous IoT identifiers. Since the current studies did not fully consider the conflicts between heterogeneous IoT resolution protocols, existing solutions can only provide heterogeneous IoT identifiers that follow a certain specific IoT resolution protocol; they cannot provide resolution support to IoT identifications that follow different IoT resolution protocols. Thus the current studies have only partially solved the conflict problem in heterogeneous IoT identifier resolution.